Japanese sales data: quick drop for PS3's Virtua Fighter 5

February 24th, 2007, 07:23 Posted By: gunntims0103

news via el33online

The latest Japanese sales data released by tracking firm Media Create reveals that Virtua Fighter 5 has fallen from the top of the charts to 25th in the space of a week. It remains the sole PS3 game in the top 50 games sold in the week of 12th to 18th of February 2007. Japanese video game sales are usually quite front-loaded in that a large portion of their sales are made in the first week, but this is a surprising result for the anticipated title.

The PS3 console itself kept a fairly steady 20676 units sold, which is still a lot less than its main rival, Nintendo's Wii with 63618 units sold. The DS dropped a lot from the previous week with 136999 sales (down from just over 200000) but, as has been the case for a year now, it is significantly supply constrained. The PSP has kept a very steady pace, selling 34505 this week, up 2000 from the previous week.

Prof. Layton and the Mysterious Village Japan BoxLevel 5 made their publishing debut with Prof. Layton and the Mysterious Village on the Nintendo DS in the week and managed to top the charts with a very healthy 136736 copies sold. Level 5 are best known for developing Dragon Quest 8 and the Dark Cloud series, but up to now have not published a title themselves. The rest of the top 5 were also all new releases, shared between the PSP, DS and PS2.

Sony will be looking forward to the next few weeks with big releases coming out for PSP in Monster Hunter Portable 2 (this week) and for the PS3 in Gundam Musou (next week). Monster Hunter Portable, by Capcom, is expected to have first week sales of over 500000.

This coming week also sees the release of Fire Emblem: Goddess of Dawn and a new Naruto game for the Wii as well as Sim City DS and Metal Slug PSP for their respective platforms.

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